Nine To Five

Susan Wilson Solovic likes her sleep and her time off. But it wasn't long ago that the hour between 2 and 3 a.m. was her prime e-mailing time, and vacations were little more than a different setting in which to work.

"People thought I was crazy," says Solovic, the chief executive of Small Business Television Network, a Web-based news and information service for entrepreneurs. But, she says, "our company was growing rapidly, and my life became completely consumed by the business."

Five years after the launch of SBTV.com, Solovic approaches work far differently. For starters, she is no longer at the mercy of her e-mail and refuses to take projects on vacation.

"I was wearing too many hats, and it took a toll. People started shutting me out of their lives," she says. The irony, Solovic says, is that once she started sticking to her pledge of not checking voice mail (one too many rambling messages led to a disclaimer on her voice-mail message that she doesn't listen to it that often) or e-mailing in the wee hours of the morning, her work was not adversely affected.

"It didn't impact my productivity at all," she says.

So much for the available-at-all-hours, no-holds-barred executive. Nine-to-five is back in vogue for a growing number of high-level women--and, in some cases, men--who are building barricades to keep work in its place. They're shutting off their BlackBerrys, refusing after-hours e-mails and just saying ''no" to business travel, all in the interest of balance.

To be sure, in this economic climate, when having a job seems like more of a privilege than a right, workplaces are going lean on employees and the modus operandi is survival, balance can seem beside the point. Sharon Meers, co-author of Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All and a former managing director at
Goldman Sachs
, says there is no question the economic downturn makes it harder to push for a more balanced schedule, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. "Position it as, 'I'm really good at my job,' " she says, "and be sure to explain how this will help your organization or company."

One of the new limit-setters is Inhi Cho, 33, an
IBM
vice president of Strategy, Information and Management. She won't schedule meetings before 9 a.m., so she can have time at home in the morning to spend time with her son, Jacob, and she guards her weekend by logging off the office computer from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.

Another, Malika Saar, 38, executive director of the Rebecca Project, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights organization, recently turned down an invitation to give a keynote address at a conference that would have kept her on the road for three days. (She enlisted a coworker with older children and more travel flexibility to give the speech in her stead.)

Attitudes like these mark a dramatic reversal from the extremes of the past decade, in which career success was directly tied to being constantly accessible. (Hop on a plane to China at a moment's notice? No problem!)

That was especially true for women, who felt compelled to prove that their other responsibilities, especially children, weren't getting in the way of their jobs, and they could keep up with their male co-workers.

But the new maxim, advanced by executives such as
Xerox
Chief Executive
Ann
Mulcahy
Ann Mulcahy
, sounds like this: "Businesses need to be 24/7. Individuals don't."

In fact, the 24/7 gladiator work style can actually be detrimental, says Meers, "We know from the research that people who work 24/7 are the ones who cause fire drills," she says. "There's a perception that working that much is heroic, but work quality suffers when you stay at the office too long."

In her book, Meers cites Martin Baily, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors: "There is probably not a productivity penalty to shortening hours in the U.S., and there may even be a benefit." Better health is just one of the upsides.

Rachel Permuth-Levine, Ph.D., a deputy director at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, leaves her office at 4:30 p.m. so she can spend a couple hours with her 3-year-old son before he goes to bed. But, says Dr. Permuth-Levine, there are other reasons for leaving the office at a decent hour: Because her role at the NIH is to promote workplace wellness, "I have to [be] a good model of balance," she explains.

Still, some women say guarding one's personal time has its professional cost.

Saar says there are times when she feels judged for not being completely consumed by her job. "There's an unspoken disappointment that people can't fully rely on me," she says. "It isn't expressed by everyone, but I feel it when an invite is not even extended as a formality or I am cut out of a conference or speaking engagement because daycare is not provided."

Indeed, a woman's likelihood of persuading higher-ups to respect her schedule depends largely on whether she's earned her stripes already. For Permuth-Levine, it was receiving the most awards for excellence of any employee at an institute of 1,600 people and being promoted to acting director after just four months. "I've established a track record," she says.